I woke up at 8:00 AM after a full night’s sleep. I drank oatmeal and a fruit smoothie for breakfast. My mom asked me if I felt full and I told her I haven’t felt full since the surgery. I did have my first bowel movement this morning though! Sorry if that’s TMI. After breakfast, I took 600 mg of Children’s Motrin and proceeded to kick butt. I went into my office and filed a bunch of paperwork and paid off the two credit cards I used to pay the surgeon’s fee. I felt like my energy level was finally back up to a semi-normal level, so I took advantage of it and got things crossed off my to-do list.
My fiancé woke up a few hours later and showed me the giant hockey puck-shaped bruise he got last night from blocking a slap shot. Then he pointed out that I was starting to bruise too. I have neon yellow bruises covering my entire neck! If he hadn’t said something, I’m not sure I would have noticed because they don’t hurt. The camera flash makes them look worse then they appear in-person.
My fiancé made himself a breakfast burrito, and hearing him talk about it from the other room made me CRAVE bacon, so I asked my mom to blend together some bacon and diced potatoes. It ended up tasting “smokey” – I think the bacon was smoke-flavored and that overpowered the mixture. I still drank it anyway. It’s funny how you get weird cravings like that.
We spent the rest of the afternoon working on our wedding guest list and wedding website. I was doing great until my sister called. We work in the pharmaceutical industry in the same line of work, and she has a job interview on Monday. She wanted help preparing responses for the interview questions they might ask. I was more than happy to oblige, but I didn’t realize talking loudly on speakerphone for a half hour would cause the roof of my mouth to swell as bad as it did. I had to implement a no-talking rule for a few hours, so my fiancé watched the Pittsburgh Penguins game in one room, I worked on our wedding website in another room, and we just texted each other back and forth instead of talking.
For dinner, my mom went out and got me Jamba Juice and Paradise Bakery Mac ‘n Cheese (my favorite thing in the entire world). The latter tasted okay blended – it’s not as good without the texture of the pasta noodles. It kinda just felt like I was drinking cheese, which was gross. My fiancé ended up making me the “Beef Stroganoff” recipe in my little yellow liquid diet book. He forgot to add the sour cream, so it probably could’ve tasted better.
My morning was great, but my night was awful. Having read a bunch of other people’s blogs, I’ve noticed a common theme. At one point during everyone’s recovery, they feel like they are going to die. It’s usually around Day 3. This whole time, I felt proud of myself for not getting to that point. I didn’t feel like I was going to die when I was projectile vomiting blood on Day 0. I didn’t feel like I was going to die when I woke up from intense heat on Day 2. I can’t even really say that I was worried about dying in my jaw surgeon’s office on Day 3, when waves of heat and dizziness were rolling over me. But tonight, I finally said the words “I feel like I’m going to die” out loud.
We were watching the first episode of Westworld when all of a sudden I couldn’t take it anymore. Just like how I couldn’t finish the last ten minutes of the Star Trek movie the other night. I had to tell my fiancé to turn off the TV so I could take a moment to “gather” myself. I was getting a hot flash again, and my body felt super weak from my low-calorie diet. I think my body isn’t good at regulating temperature. In fact, I know it’s not – a few years ago, my fiancé took me to the emergency room because I thought I had heat stroke. I paid $700 for them to take my temperature and tell me I was fine (thanks, Obamacare).
We briefly considered that perhaps I was allergic to the antibiotic, Azithromycin. I already know I’m allergic to Bactrin (which causes hives to break out all over my body), but when we Googled the symptoms, it was hard to tell them apart from normal jaw surgery symptoms (e.g., swelling of the face/throat, dizziness, trouble breathing). Once again, after my hot flash was over, my body swung to freezing cold. I got under my comforter, took my last dose of Children’s Motrin, and tried to go to sleep. It was 1:00 AM – the latest I have stayed up since my surgery, so maybe my body just didn’t like being up that late…
Below are the Day 5 pictures I took. I accidentally forgot to take off my Breathe Right strip for the first picture, and then I think I ripped it off too fast because it left a mark in the second picture.
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